Competitive Intelligence, Right Under Your Nose

How often do you talk to your customers? If you add up the touches made by sales, account management, marketing and other client-facing services in your company, you might find that each of your customers is talking to you very regularly.

Hopefully, you have a central management group that has established some formal information gathering processes. Very common programs would include Customer Satisfaction, Account Loyalty, Win-back, Win Loss, Client Retention and Defection. Usually, these programs fall under the heading of "Voice of the Customer" (VOC).

So, you have two types of contact:
1-Informal, everyday conversations
2-Formal programs to gather Voice of the Customer Data

The fact of the matter is that your customers know nearly as much about the competition as they do about you. They evaluated the competition before selecting you as their vendor. They are regularly courted by the competition and many of your best clients also have purchased from your competitors, either in the past or currently.

Take a minute to see if your VOC program is generating competitive intelligence. In my experience, most customer sat and loyalty interviews focus on the client's experience with their present vendor. Go one step further and:

1-Ask your clients who they perceive as your biggest threats
2-Find out what they are hearing about the competitors' recent initiatives and offers
3-Understand how you stack up in various performance areas

The information will not only be enlightening, but will show your company what is happening in the market place in real time. Your company will benefit in the following ways:

1-Sales will know what is being said about your company by the competitors. They will have more intelligence to sell more effectively and counter negative messages
2-Marketing will know what the prospects and clients value in the marketplace (not just from you) and will be able to establish messaging that drive home the most important value propositions
3-Product Development will know the advances being made by the competition and will understand how well these innovations may be received by the marketplace.
4-Executives will have the right Competitive Intelligence to make strategic decisions.

And, to think... all of this information resides within your current customer base.

Next week, I will co-host a webinar with Ron Sathoff. The presentation will be made on Thursday, April 19 at 2 PM ET (11 AM PT). You can register by clicking here. Consider yourself invited.

And, Current Analysis (a company that I respect) has some information on creating CI from VOC. It is good to see shared thinking between two companies.

If you want to talk specifically about these ideas, call me (801-838-9600 x5050) or send me a note (cdalley@primary-intel.com). I would like to hear your ideas, too.